teacher, researcher, life-long learner

I have been so honored to be a part of the Fulbright Specialist program this past February and March 2018 in Barranquilla, Colombia at the Universidad del Norte. I’ve worked for the past few weeks with colleagues at the Instituto de Idiomas on a new undergraduate program: Lenguas Modernas y Culturas. This program has a special focus on not only teaching multiple languages (students will be proficient in two and know a third upon graduation), but also integrating ideas of critical citizenship, discourse studies, and global perspectives into their coursework.

“Our future is not in the stars but in our own minds and hearts. Creative leadership and liberal education, which in fact go together, are the first requirements for a hopeful future for humankind. Fostering these–leadership, learning, and empathy between cultures–was and remains the purpose of the international scholarship program that I was privileged to sponsor in the U.S. Senate over forty years ago. It is a modest program with an immodest aim–the achievement in international affairs of a regime more civilized, rational and humane than the empty system of power of the past. I believed in that possibility when I began. I still do.”

Many St. Louis area residents may not think of their city as multilingual, but it is. We could consider just one group that has changed the face of our metropolitan area over the past 30 years: Bosnians. In 2012 (and probably still today), they were the most populous foreign-born group here, estimated at over 70,000. The majority of Bosnians came to St. Louis as refugees in the 1990s, but secondary migration from Europe and from around the US continued throughout the early 2000s.

As an educator of students studying to become teachers, I always look for ways to help others understand the communities that they serve (or will serve). Toward this end, partnering with local educational organizations, students in one of my teacher-education classes studied qualitative research methods and conducted what we called service-research projects. Similar to but somewhat distinct from service-learning or community-based research (Boyer, 1999, see Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professorate), service-research projects combine these kinds of efforts: they are learning experiences that simultaneously teach research skills and academic content, while students serve an organization and learn about its particular community. In one particular semester, students’ projects explored the linguistic, racial, religious, and migrant experiences of youth in the St. Louis area, including those from Bosnian Muslim families.

In a recent publication in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (2017, click here!), my co-authors and I discussed the results of this work. As defined in our abstract, we argue: Skills developed through qualitative research and community partnerships can be essential for developing education students’ cultural competency and understandings about diverse student populations. This paper provides a snapshot of our work by defining service-research and showcasing one student research team that worked with a local immigrant organization and developed three case studies of young women from Bosnian Muslim families. Through an analysis and discussion of service-research and the students’ results, we argue for the integration of qualitative research skills, service projects, and community partnerships into educator preparation programs.

Please join me in learning more about how working and studying with community members helps us understand and work with our communities better!

Just last week, my colleagues (Drs. Kim Song and Sujin Kim of the University of Missouri-St. Louis) and I found out that we were awarded a new National Professional Development Grant. Our project, titled Strengthening Equity and Excellence for Teachers of English Learners (SEE-TEL) is funded by the Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition. Over $2.6 million will allow SEE-TEL to more effectively prepare hundreds of inservice teachers, administrators, teacher education faculty, and parents to be responsive to linguistically and culturally diverse K-12 learners. I’m especially excited because our grant activities will emphasize equity and civil rights for immigrant and refugee children from across the most high-need areas of Missouri, a state that is often passed over for seeming monolingual (but it’s not!).

This work is critical to help Missouri meet increasingly complex needs facing our schools in urban, suburban, and rural areas. Most significant, SEE-TEL will offer seven online TESOL courses and certification to a select group of 50 teachers from four school districts: Bayless (St. Louis area), Carthage (near Joplin), Kansas City Public Schools, and Columbia Public Schools. In addition, SEE-TEL will arrange intensive summer institutes to 120 educators and school leaders from these districts and beyond; training for university faculty members; and partnerships and literacy activities with 160 family members over the five-year grant project. A program evaluation, led by myself and another colleague, Dr. Christine Li-Grining of Loyola University-Chicago, will study the long-term impact of the professional development activities on participants and students.

The growth of immigrant and refugee children is significant across the state, which faces a shortage of teachers for emerging bilinguals (or “English Learners,” ELs) in our K-12 schools. For instance, Kansas City Public Schools currently has 3800 active students in English education support programs and 400-500 who are being monitored. Over the last school year they saw a 180% increase in refugee enrollment. KCPS’s largest language group is Spanish, but second to that is now Swahili, which just moved past Somali. They have multiple job openings right now for teachers in language education (posted on the Missouri Dual Language Network’s Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/moduallanguage/).

Job openings specific to this grant and more information about our project will be posted soon!

This morning, I was listening to NPR, and I heard a story about how one young man decided to get out of his same old bubble. He built an app that used publicly-listed Facebook events to randomly choose new places for him to go — to get him out of that bubble. Attending random events, he made new friends and had various opportunities to view the world from new perspectives.

So how might we help develop similar bubble-popping experiences for young people? I believe that schools like the St. Louis Language Immersion School (SLLIS) can and do help children view the world in new ways. SLLIS has integration as one of its core values: integration across race, income level, language background, immigrant status, and more. The school immerses children in new perspectives, quite literally, by teaching students all of the typical subject areas using a language other than English. For most students at the school, English is their first and only language, but the school also attracts many children from multilingual households.

How else might schools pop bubbles? We cannot just put people together in the same room to explore new perspectives; we have to talk, think, and write about such experiences. In the spring of 2017, the Quality Teachers for English Learners project led by Dr. Kim Song supported a series of family literacy events at SLLIS. I participated in these events as both a leader and a participant with my daughter. Our goal was to work with families to support them sharing their stories, as one more way to “pop some bubbles” and learn from others. I’m thrilled to share the pre-press version of my daughter’s book, in which she documents how her school has opened her eyes to an Outside World.

Hello from my friends and research team! From 2015-2016, this dedicated group of scholars at the University of Missouri, Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis, has worked on a project called: “School Board Members and Policymaking in Changing Communities.” Despite all the talk about federal education programs and state-mandated tests in the news, education in the U.S. is still largely locally determined, with school boards serving as the principal policymaking bodies (Hess, 2002). While recent research suggests that school boards may help to establish policies that attend to diverse communities, we know little about how board members come to understand demographic change and make policies that respond to it (Turner, 2015). What ideas, conversations, and processes lead up to their decision-making? As the U.S. experiences its greatest immigration since the turn of the 20th century (Massey, 2008), we asked: (1) What do board members in rural, suburban, and urban Missouri know about immigration, English Learners (ELs), and EL program options? (2) What are their beliefs about immigrants, ELs, and language learning? (3) How do their contexts shape their knowledge, beliefs, and decision-making? These questions seem ever more important, as schools struggle to address concerns facing immigrant communities in our current, uncertain times.

To date, we have developed a brief overview of findings that may be helpful for our local organizations that provide training to school boards (School Board Members and Policymaking). In addition, we are preparing multiple papers from this work and will present them at this year’s AERA conference in San Antonio — see you there!